Thursday, September 1, 2016

The following post is primarily an amplification of my review published in the August issue of PoetryFlash, concerning the repetition of imagery and diction in Elegy and The Darkening Trapeze, the two posthumously published books of the poems found on his computer and in his notes after the untimely death of Larry Levis at age 49. A portion of the text can be found in my review published by PoetryFlash, but much of the material is new.

David St. John chose to begin the
second posthumously published collection of poems taken from Larry Levis’s
computer and final papers discovered after his death in 1996 with a poem that
extends the poem St. John selected as the final poem of The Selected Levis (University of Pittsburg Press, 2000), as if the
first posthumously published collection (Elegy)
did not exist. Except for one poem, the poems selected by Philip Levine for Elegy and those left to be assembled by
St. John for The Darkening Trapeze,
all came from the same uppermost stratum of the frozen landscape of Levis’s
work that he left behind. The difference between these poems in The Darkening Trapeze from those selected
by Levine is the same as the difference between the snow fallen and swept from
the front door of Levis’ apartment and the snow drifted up against the back
door—both bring to the mind of this reviewer Stafford’s “freezing snow /
hesitating toward us from its gray heaven / falling not quite silently / and
under [which] you and I still are walking” (Stafford, "Near").

Be
reminded, then, of the following final lines from “At the Grave of My Guardian
Angel: St. Louis Cemetery, New Orleans” addressing “Nothing,” not as an absence
but as a presence as real as anything:

We’d better be getting on our way soon, sweet Nothing.

I’ll buy
you something pretty from the store.

I’ll let
you wear the flower in your hair even though you can only vanish

entirely underneath its brown, implacable
petals.

Stop your
sniveling. I can almost see the all night diner looming

Up ahead,
with its lights & its flashing sign a testimony to failure.

I can
almost see our little apartment under the freeway overpass, the cups on

the mantle rattling continually—

The Mojave
one way; the Pacific the other.

At least
we’ll have each other’s company.

And it’s
not as if you held your one wing, tattered as it was, in contempt

These lines could very well precede the opening lines from The
Darkening Trapeze, either as a separate poem, or in lines that begin "Gossip In the Village:"

I told know one, but the snows came, anyway.

They
weren’t even serious about it, at first.

Then, they
seemed to say, if nothing happened,

Snow could
say that, & almost perfectly.

The village slept in the gunmetal
of its evening,

And there,
through a thin dress once, I touched

A body so
alive & eager I thought it must be

Someone
else’s soul. And though I was mistaken,

And though
we parted, & the roads kept thawing between snows

In the
first spring sun, & it was all, like spring,

Irrevocable,
irony has made me thinner. Someday, weeks

From now, I
will wake alone. My fate, I will think,

Will be to
have no fate.

And with these
opening lines, St. John pulls us back onto the dark road of Levis’s world where
“Nothing,” is “riding beside [him]…seat belt around invisible waist,” with enough
corporality to wear “something pretty from the store,” and where a sleeping
village is as “alive and eager” as “someone else’s soul” beneath its “thin
dress” of snow; a world where Nothing provides enough company on the journey to
elicit affection, but where at the end of the journey, the reader arrives at a
place where the poet’s fate is “to have no fate.”

This gesture of
defining a thing with the absence of its core or the opposite of its chief
characteristic is a signature move of Levis, brought into sharp focus with the
poems left to St. John to assemble into The
Darkening Trapeze. The “flesh that has stepped out of its flesh” in “La
Strada;” “the light…the nothing all light is” in “A Singing in the Rocks;” “Even
wailing / … / Was really a quiet” and “Everything became different / By staying
just the same” in “Idle Companion;” “the home [one] enters [that] is not his
home” in “The Necessary Angel;” “the café tables” in "Threshold of the Oblivious
Blossoming," “[that] Were empty because it was raining, / [and] The rain [that]
was empty as well”—all sprinkled throughout the characteristic images of trees
and snow and even a horse or two in an artful way to remind us, lest we grow
too confident in the world of sensate experience, that if one digs deep enough,
there is really nothing there at all.

At
the same time, many times in the same poems, Levis subverts our expectations by
beginning a line in a way that will seem to be headed toward its polar
opposite, only to move laterally in a direction we could not have predicted,
seemingly mocking previous lines and even the reader for losing faith in
everything, giving us just enough to believe in to seek some kind of
progression in the next lines or the next poem. Levis uses double images, often
in the closing lines to a poem, in this way. After fearing, for example, that
our fate, like Levis’s, is to have no fate, we, like him, “feel suddenly
hungry,” only to find that “The morning will be bright, & wrong.” In “Col
Tempo” Levis ends the poem with “It seems so limitless, the litter in the
streets, / The large families of the poor, the stars over it all.” In “The
Necessary Angel” he closes the poem with a double-double—two images and two
adjectives to describe them.

As she goes home to her small apartment, living alone,

The lights
of the city glittering in the snowy air;

Said so
that it can never be unsaid, by the creaking

Of his
wife’s chair, by the ironic scraping of limbs

Against a
wall, until the two sounds are all there is—

Filling the
house with their brief & thoughtless triumph.

Levis readers will immediately
think of the closing lines to “My Story in a Late Style of Fire:” “It is so
American, fire. So like us. / Its desolation. And its eventual, brief triumph.”

I
agree for the most part with Peter Everwine, that Levis intentionally repeated
images and phrases as “motifs or riffs to unify the collection”—the collection
meaning the unpublished body of work he left on his computer and in his
notebooks upon his death. I believe that the two endings above are an example
of that. However, I also believe that sometimes Levis “cannibalize[ed] certain
passages from some poems in order to heighten and enlarge other more ambitious
poems,” or that he even used those passages as place holders for edits that he
never had time to complete.

Consider
two lines from “La Strada,” a poem that Levine left out of Elegy, containing two lines seemingly lifted out of “Boy in Video
Arcade” that made the grade for Levine because, presumably, these lines were
more organically related to the latter poem. In Elegy “the scuffed linoleum floor” appears in the opening
description of the boy:

I see a sullen boy in a video arcade.

He’s the
only one there at this hour, shoulders slightly bent above a machine.

I see the
pimples on his chin, the scuffed linoleum
on the floor [italics mine].

In “La Strada” this image appears
as a memory when

One day you
get an earache. One day you can’t breathe.

You notice
the old nurse wears a girdle as she bends over you,

You
remember the smell of Spanish rice from childhood,

An
orphanage with scuffed linoleum on its floors.

The narrative arc of the poem is
driven throughout by the repeated question “What happens next?” Each answer
builds in intensity from “The clown is dead,” to the above passage, to “It’s a
carnival,” actually “a pretty poor excuse for a carnival, torn tents,
everything // Worn out.” The poem culminates with these final two lines:

Worn out. But I guess it has to go on anyhow. And I guess

Death will blow his little fucking
trumpet.

Perhaps Levis was
using the line as a place-holder-ending to a poem that he never finished
editing. And perhaps Levine was correct in his original assumption, and
selected the more finished poem for Elegy,
leaving this one behind. We will never know. What we do know is that David St.
John has assembled this second set of Levis's final poems from poems not selected by Philip Levine for the first posthumously published collection, Elegy--and that there are numerous shared images and lines between the two collections.

In the end, the legacy of Levis's poems reminds me of what the theologian, William Hendricks, said about the blessings of God: "[They] are not so much to be understood, as they are to be enjoyed." In places, Elegy and The Darkening Trapeze defy description. But, for me, they never disappoint.

was born in the Midwest, grew up in New Mexico, and has lived in the San Francisco bay area for over a decade. Terry has published in numerous literary journals, including Best New Poets 2012, Crab Orchard Review, Green Mountains Review, Great River Review, New Millennium Writings, and The Comstock Review. His work has garnered six Pushcart Prize nominations. He is the winner of the 2014 Crab Orchard Review Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry. His chapbook, Altar Call, was a winner in the the 2013 San Gabriel Valley Literary Festival, and appears in the Anthology, Diesel. His chapbook, If They Have Ears to Hear, won the 2012 Copperdome Poetry Chapbook Contest, and is available from Southeast Missouri State University Press. His first full-length collection of poems, In This Room (CW Books, 2016), is now available, and his second, Dharma Rain, was released by Saint Julian Press in October of 2016. Terry is a 2008 poetry MFA graduate of New England College, an assistant editor at Trio House Press, and a free-lance poetry consultant. For more information about him and his work see www.terrylucas.com

"I'm going to stare at the whorled grain of wood in this desk...to make it confess everything." LL

About Me

was born in the Midwest, grew up in New Mexico, and has lived in the San Francisco bay area for over a decade. Terry has published in numerous literary journals, including Best New Poets 2012, Crab Orchard Review, Green Mountains Review, Great River Review, New Millennium Writings, and The Comstock Review. His work has garnered six Pushcart Prize nominations. He is the winner of the 2014 Crab Orchard Review Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry. His chapbook, Altar Call, was a winner in the the 2013 San Gabriel Valley Literary Festival, and appears in the Anthology, Diesel. His chapbook, If They Have Ears to Hear, won the 2012 Copperdome Poetry Chapbook Contest, and is available from Southeast Missouri State University Press. His first full-length collection of poems, In This Room (CW Books, 2016), is now available, and his second, Dharma Rain, was released by Saint Julian Press in October of 2016. Terry is a 2008 poetry MFA graduate of New England College, an assistant editor at Trio House Press, and a free-lance poetry consultant. For more information about him and his work see www.terrylucas.com